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Argent Tournament Public Quests?

I will be honest, I was dubious about the argent tournament. Aside from the sheer dozy headed brilliance of having a grand jousting tournament when there are evil undead necromancers to kill (I swear the argent crusade must be run by my ex-boss – yes the company went tits up), I mentally filed it under:

more daily quests…

… some of which are annoying

more rep grind for no special purpose

but it does look kind of cool to charge monsters with a lance from horseback

I also like Arthurian stories so was amused by the knights in shining armour theme to the quests. So, annoying but inoffensive time waster that would keep my interest for as long as it took me to figure out how jousting worked, and provide another new way to cover my repair bills.

Three things changed my mind today: the quest to kill the boneguard commander (among other things), the quest to kill chillwind the frost drake, and the quest to kiss a boatload of frogs until one turns into a princess.

Yes, one of these things is not like the others, but they are all fairly irritating quests, if you do them solo. Which most people do.

Today, there were a few people doing each quest when I showed up. Some from different factions – and we all helped each other. There was no reason for it. I saw an alliance paladin killing gargoyles so that I could make a clean pull of the commander. I helped a warlock make his kill by shield breaking the opponent he was fighting. And so on. We weren’t grouped (although in some cases we could have done), but we were behaving cooperatively, not competitively.

People queued politely for chillwind and helped each other with the kills, A friendly orc whispered his frog-kissing macro to me while we pursued our amphibian dating strategies down at the duckpond.

And it make me think of the public questing from Warhammer.

I don’t really believe that Blizzard deliberately put in so many new quests that could be tackled cooperatively, I just don’t feel that they have that level of finesse. There have also been dailies before that you could help others with even when you weren’t grouped. Also, my server (being a RP-PVE one) has always tended to veer towards the cooperative rather than competitive side.

But today, quests that I used to find annoying actually made me smile. The sense of cooperating with people with whom you can’t even communicate does more to make the game feel like a massively multiplayer community than any number of solo or 5 man quests ever could. I would love to see more genuinely cooperative content, where you gain far more from cooperating than you ever could from competing.

Instances and raids were always intended to be cooperative, and in a sense they are. But we compete for raid spots, we struggle to put groups together for instances (unless you are lucky enough to have a fixed group), and so on. It’s not the same as rolling up to a quest location, finding other people there, and being pleased to see them even if you have never met them before.

The jousting doesn’t really feel like the jousts you’ll see at a re-enactment or in films, but it still gets the basic jist of riding around on your mount with a big lance.

The mounts themselves are vehicles and you need to have a special lance equipped to hop on. Once you do, you have a few abilities. You can raise a shield (that stacks to three levels), you have a ranged attack that removes one stack of an opponent’s shield, and you can charge at an opponent, which also removes one stack of shield. And you also have a basic attack.

At the tournament, you can do various daily quests to earn the right to represent that city of your choice in the champions tournament. One quest does involve jousting with NPCS (which mostly requires staying in melee, and grabbing the odd charge when the enemy backs off to get range). When you are in the champion’s tournament there are more quests you can do, and the NPCs you fight have slightly better reactions.

I think I like the idea of it more than the actual implementation. It’s not horrible, though. And quite fun to be able to ride the other race’s mounts.

I have the same experience with the Boneguard quests. Whenever I see someone out there, I help with shieldbreaking the commanders or keeping gargoyle adds off them, just as people out there do the same for me. If people didn’t, this would probably be the most horrifying quest out there I have ever done.